MANHATTAN — Not long after taking over as basketball coach at Kansas State, Bruce Weber made a critical observation.

He duly noted the team he inherited isn’t blessed with accurate marksmen.

Unfortunately for Weber, any demo days he schedules to work on shooting won’t include a personal how-to from the new coach.

“As a basketball player, if he could have been a little better shooter ...’’ recalled older brother Ron, his voice trailing off as he retraced Bruce’s game.

“I’m sure he doesn’t want his players to hear that. He took it to the basket and ended up with 10 or 12 free throws a game, but at 5-foot-11, or whatever he was, if you can’t shoot the ball from the perimeter, you’re going to be in a little bit of trouble.’’

Weber usually worked through trouble with toughness.

Consider the positions he played — catcher, point guard, quarterback — growing up as a working-class kid from Milwaukee. Each required ample resolve.

Baseball, which in Weber’s youth robbed him of his hometown Braves, then gave him the hardscrabble Brewers, was the sport his father coached in the summer, with gear waiting for his sons to put on before squatting.

“Dad told us, if you want to play, be a catcher. No one else will want it,’’ Bruce said. “The joke in Milwaukee was that for seven years straight a Weber was always in the little box scores, catching (for Marshall High School), and people were like, ‘This guy keep flunking?’ But it was me and my little brother. I started varsity for three years and Dave for four.’’

*******

Sports was always the fabric that threaded the Weber family so tightly. Everyone played, everyone watched and eventually, every kid — Jan, Ron, Bruce and Dave — taught after earning college degrees. Another sister, Carrie, was pursuing an education degree when she was killed in a car wreck at the age of 19, the same day Bruce began his college coaching career as an assistant for Gene Keady.

The career paths taken by the Weber children, as well as their competitiveness, were instilled by Dad, a hard-nosed German who never pursued higher education himself after boarding a ship with his parents and immigrating from Austria.

Louie Weber — and for that matter the kids’ mother, Dawn — expected things to be done the right way.

During the day, Louie was a sales rep for the Heil Company. Yet he never quit his night job while providing for his family. Working for Milwaukee’s recreation department, he organized youth leagues, coached teams and interacted with kids.

Sometimes in demonstrative fashion.

“He was kind of legendary,’’ said Ron Weber, who at 60 is retired from teaching but remains the successful 31-year head basketball coach of Waupaca High School in central Wisconsin. “He’d wind up standing on the bleacher that was the bench, shouting instructions to the players, so he set the tone in our family as far as the game of basketball and coaching, too. He was very fiery. That’s where Bruce gets his hyperness.’’

At times, like all kids, Bruce would dismiss the straightforward advice dispensed by his father. Not from lack of respect, but because it was Dad. He was around him all the time.

To his amazement, however, friends often hung on every word.

“To my buddies, what he had to say, it was Louie’s wisdom,’’ Bruce said. “This was my dad. I didn’t want to listen to that. But if you talk to guys I grew up with, he had a good common sense about life and he instilled that in us.’’

Baseball was the sport Weber tried to play as a walk-on for Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The program, however, was dropped shortly after he enrolled. So he tried basketball and eventually moved on into coaching.

While Louie certainly impacted the identical career paths each Weber child took — “You just didn’t have a choice,’’ Bruce said. “He said it, you did it.’’ — the moves Ron made as the oldest brother were influential too.

When he broke his tibia playing football as a high school sophomore, Louie prohibited Bruce and Dave from playing the sport. The injury affected Ron’s season in basketball, a sport he had begun favoring. To the point he took a job with the rec department and actually got to coach Bruce on a youth team.

“We all got into basketball and I, maybe, led that charge,’’ Ron Weber said.

*******

Basketball was pretty cool back then anyway in Milwaukee.

Al McGuire was building an NCAA championship team at Marquette. The legendary coach actually conducted night practices on weekends to prevent players from going out — at least real early — and the Weber kids often attended the workouts. For Christmas, the family saved money to present Louie tickets to the holiday tournament Marquette once hosted.

On the pro side, the fledgling Milwaukee Bucks won a rather key coin flip for the top pick in the 1969 NBA draft and chose UCLA center Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In his second season, Kareem teamed with Oscar Robertson to bring the NBA crown to Milwaukee.

“We really gravitated to basketball,’’ said younger brother Dave, 51, who eventually coached at the college level and has spent the past 17 years shaping Glenbrook North High School into a Chicagoland power.

“I was lucky enough to be the only (brother) who played in college, but that was because I was lucky enough to have two older brothers who coached me. We’d play in the alley back then and Bruce would make me work out. Now, what he did would be like a personal trainer and you’d pay $100 an hour.

While those back stories are fun to share, the Weber brothers usually center their basketball conversations — “My wife goes nuts, because we don’t talk about anything else,’’ Bruce said — on team building and recruiting.

The hard part for Ron and Dave is the public criticism of Bruce, which goes with him working at a higher profile.

In particular, last season was rough. A poor finish led to his dismissal at Illinois, where his mother proudly watched Bruce coach the Illini before she died in 2005, the same year they reached the NCAA Tournament final.

“Living in the Chicagoland area, and in my job, the criticism is very difficult for me to hear,’’ Dave said. “He was far enough away from it (in Champaign), Bruce didn’t have to hear the stuff so much and how every move he made at Illinois was analyzed by the Chicago media.

“Honestly, I love the state of Illinois, but I’m glad that part of my life is over and I’m happy for Bruce. To be at K-State is the greatest thing to happen to him, and it’s taken a ton of bricks off my shoulders too.’’

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